I’ve always thought of trains as one of the safer modes of transportation. But recent high-profile train accidents remind us that even vehicles on tracks can run into problems that can result in crashes, with potential results including death, injury, and property loss.
You may remember the tragic Amtrak accident on May 12 in Philadelphia. It killed eight people and injured more than 200 others. The train derailed while taking a curve for which the maximum recommended speed was 50 miles per hour, but preliminary analysis from the National Transportation Safety Board indicates the train was moving at 102 miles per hour. This wreck put new focus on the need for positive train control, better known as PTC, systems.
The NTSB has been talking about the need to improve railway safety with PTC since 1969. However, when two Penn Central commuter trains collided head on, killing four and injuring 43 things heated up due to the increased national attention. In fact, it should be noted that the NTSB in 2014 put out a “most wanted list” on which implementing PTC systems ranked first. The list also noted at least six other railroad accidents from 2008 to 2012.
“PTC systems work by monitoring the location and movement of trains, then slowing or stopping a train that is not being operated in accordance with signal systems and/or operating rules,” the NTSB explains. “This safety redundancy prevents train-to-train collisions and overspeed derailments, as well as the associated injuries and fatalities to passengers, railway workers, and others.”
Yet for all the talk about the need for PTC systems, and the fact the government has set requirements regarding the installation of PTC systems, most U.S. railroads will fail to install positive train control by the Dec. 31 federally mandated deadline, notes Thierry Sens, marketing director of the transportation segment at Alcatel-Lucent in a recent TrackTalk article, Give PTC* the best chance of success with IP/MPLS.
That said, PTC systems do exist. Toward the middle of this year an estimated 14,300 of the 22,000 locomotives in the U.S. were partially equipped with PTC, Sens says. Plus, 19,000 of the 32,600 wayside interface units and 1,800 of the 4,000 base station radios required for PTC had been installed since the government in 2008 ordered PTC be installed on lines carrying hazardous materials or passengers.
As the NTSB paper notes, PTC systems are in use on the Northeast Corridor and on the Michigan Line between Chicago and Detroit. And as Sens discusses, Norfolk Southern is also among the organizations moving PTC forward by upgrading its communications network to IP/MPLS.
The IP/MPLS network allows the railroad, which is one of the nation’s largest (with a 34,600km network), to separate and prioritize traffic, and provides the resiliency required for the important PTC function via its fast reroute, link aggregation group, non-stop routing, and non-stop services capabilities. Alcatel-Lucent’s ADSL+ solutions, integrated access devices, microwave technology, and Service Access Routers power the Norfolk Southern IP/MPLS network, which was first deployed in 2010 and now operates in 22 states.
“PTC is the right thing for the U.S. railroad industry, particularly following recent high-profile accidents,” says Sens. “It will prevent train-to-train collisions, derailments caused by excessive speed, unauthorized incursions on track where maintenance is taking place and the movement of a train through a switch left in the wrong position. Its interoperability features are also a critical element of an efficient and successful rail network.”
Attorney Barlow Keener agrees. As he mentions in a recent INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine column, railroad safety and railroad viability are both for railroad companies and their riders, as well as for the American economy itself. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, he notes, 140,000 miles of U.S. railroads deliver 40 percent of all national freight.
]]>The mining industry is booming thanks not only to natural resource demands in China, but also because every electronic device, including smartphones a lot of the precious materials that miners pull from the earth. For example, an iPhone contains gold, silver, platinum, copper and many rare earth elements like Yttrium, Lanthanum, Neodymium, Gadolinium and Europium.
Keeping these bustling mines efficient requires a highly reliable, accessible, secure and high-performance communications network. The reason is the mines tend to be operational 24/7/365. It is a major factor in why many mines are in the process of or evaluating upgrading their communications networks, since the existing Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, proprietary VHF and PMR options are not keeping pace with mining information interchange demands of all types.
One solution is private, ultra-broadband, as described in a recent TrackTalk posting, LTE for mining: delivering ultra broadband in the middle of nowhere, by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU). Indeed, the reason for the title is somewhat obvious in that mines tend to be in not just remote but very remote locations.
For example, the Rio Tinto West Angelas mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the solution for better connectivity has been a private single and converged ultra-broadband 4G LTE network for its pit fields, railways and ports.
The network, installed in 2013 by Alcatel-Lucent, helps with mission-critical communications for things like in-pit autonomous haulage systems (AHS), autonomous drilling systems (ADS), driverless freight train control, anti-collision systems, in-pit proximity detection, in-pit CCTV, high-precision GPS and an array of telemetry systems and sensors are now integral components of successful mine sites around the world, according to Sens.
Alcatel-Lucent has provided an illustration of a private broadband for mining. While a bit of an eye chart, what stands out is the extent of the IP/MPLS infrastructure along with the wireless links from the mines to the backbone network.Source: Alcatel-Lucent
For Rio Tinto, the performance of its LTE network has led some observers to comment that they have a better mobile signal in the middle of the mine, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, than in their office.
“An LTE network is also contributing to reduced operating costs by using an IP protocol to support all applications on a single converged radio network, and improvements in operational efficiency,” notes Sens.
Private LTE networks and mining are a good fit, as Rio Tinto has demonstrated.
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Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is widely used by railways, highways management, power utilities and the oil & gas industry, among others. It brings an end-to-end supervisory system which acquires data from the field through Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) or Intelligent Electrical Devices (IEDs) and connects it to sensors through a communications network.
The oil industry employs SCADA technology to monitor offshore and onshore extraction, for instance.
Some pundits are predicting the end of SCADA in the near future. However, a recent TrackTalk article by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation, Oil & Gas Segments, Alcatel-Lucent, entitled with the same question posed above, Is M2M killing SCADA?, arrives at a different answer. Sens argues that SCADA instead will adapt and include M2M, which is closely related to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) megatrend currently sweeping the consumer world.
After three-generations of SCADA (standalone SCADA, distributed SCADA and networked SCADA), industries such as the railways are now using M2M for part of their SCADA needs.
“M2M is revolutionizing SCADA by offering standardization and openness,” noted Sens. “Indeed several communication protocols between a backend and a machine have been standardised by the Open Mobile Alliance and the Broadband Forum. M2M is also providing scalability, interoperability, and enhanced security by introducing the concept of middleware.”
With middleware, the fragmented SCADA solutions with individual sensors talking only to their respective backend applications can be eliminated.
“Middleware collects, syndicates and manages all flows using open communication standards and exposes the data through standard APIs and Web Services,” noted Sens. “This has enabled the development of business applications and business analytics software on top of this middleware which can compute the information collected from millions of devices.”
Once example of this is the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). They have been pioneering the use of M2M to improve the efficiency of applications in use on 3039km of lines across its network with the ultimate goal of reducing costs by up to 15 percent by 2018. Their step-by-step rollout is looking to deliver efficiency savings and an improvement in operations, and does not emphasize a single technology or specific area; it covers telecoms, operations in areas such as point maintenance, fibre optic systems and rolling stock fleet monitoring, as well as other areas.
“M2M is considered the next phase in the evolution of SCADA and logical platform for an upgrade when the time is right,” concludes the Alcatel-Lucent blog post on the topic. “It finally offers a standardized, scalable, inter-operable and future-proof solution that does not tie a customer to a single supplier but still delivers the improved efficiency and reduced costs associated with SCADA applications over the past 40 years.”
And that’s a good thing.
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